Blood and the Moon / Yeats
Blood and the Moon is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, written in 1928. Blood and the Moon Blessed be this place, More blessed still this tower; A bloody, arrogant power Rose out of the race Uttering, mastering it, Rose like these walls from these Storm-beaten cottages -- In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time HaIf dead at the top. II Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and the moon's; And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once. I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there. Swift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind, Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind, And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree, That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century, Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality; And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream, That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme; i{Saeva Indignatio} and the labourer's hire, The strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity of its own desire; Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire. III The purity of the unclouded moon Has flung its atrowy shaft upon the floor. Seven centuries have passed and it is pure, The blood of innocence has left no stain. There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood Soldier, assassin, executioner. Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood, But could not cast a single jet thereon. Odour of blood on the ancestral stair! And we that have shed none must gather there And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon. IV Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling, And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies, Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies, A couple of night-moths are on the wing. Is every modern nation like the tower, Half dead at the top? No matter what I said, For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living; but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud. Background The poem was originally published in the collection The Winding Stair in 1929 and reprinted in ''The Winding Stair and Other Poems'' in 1933. Yeats composed the poem in response to the 1927 assassination of Kevin O'Higgins, the Vice-President of the Free State, whom Yeats had known personally. The poem contains many themes common in Yeats's poems from the 1920's including the "tower", a reference to Thoor Ballylee, which had been the title of a collection of works printed the year before "Blood and the Moon" was published, as well as the "gyre" which had been a major focus of his 1920 poem, "The Second Coming". The murder of Kevin O'Higgins acted as a catalyst for Yeats's creation of the poem. As Vice President and Minister of Home Affairs in the Cosgrave Government, O'Higgins had enforced the Army Emergency Powers Act and condemned 77 Republican "irregulars", including author Erskine Childers and many men with whom O'Higgins had been allies during the Irish Civil War. O'Higgins was assassinated by a Republican gunman on 10 July 1927.Finneran 2000 pp.392-393 When Yeats heard the news that O'Higgins had been murdered, he refused to eat and spent his evening walking along the streets until the sun set.Jeffares 1996 p.255 Thoor Ballylee, Yeats's poetic model for the poem's tower, was a 16th-Century Norman castle in the Barony of Kiltartan, Ireland. The building was originally called "Islandmore Castle" and "Ballylee Castle", yet Yeats changed the name when he purchased the building in 1917 for £35. Yeats believed that the word "castle" was too magnificent and used the word "Thoor" instead as it was Gaelic for "tower". Yeats credits the landmark as being the inspiration for the poem's setting. At the top of the tower was a waste room, which inspired the image of the empty room discussed in lines 8-12:Bornstein p.28 :In mockery I have set :A powerful emblem up, :And sing it rhyme upon rhyme :In mockery of a time :Half dead at the top. At the time that Yeats purchased the tower, it had seventy-three stairs that are described in lines 16-18 of the poem: :I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare :This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; :That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there. The castle consisted of four stories. On the first floor was the dining room, and the living room was found on the second. The third story contained the bedroom, and the top story contained the "Strangers' room" which and a secret room. It was also on this story that the tower's large windows opened up over the millstream below. The windows are mentioned in the poem on lines 43-46:Bushrui 1990 pp.70-71 :Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling, :And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies, :Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies, :A couple of night-moths are on the wing. Form The poem is arranged in four stanzas that lack symmetry and vary in size and structure. The 1st stanza contains 3 quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abba, with no breaks between the lines. The second stanza contains 18 lines of text with 6 long-lined tercets using a rhyme scheme of aaa , which causes it to appear very different on the page from the stanzas that precede and follow it. The 3rd stanza is a douzain, a square block of 12 lines of verse composed of pentameter quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abba. The 4th and final stanza repeats the structure of the one that precedes it.Vendler 1972, 80-81. Yeats explained the form by suggesting that the poem is arranged on the page to visually represent the images described in the text. The first stanza represents the tower introduced in line 2. He claims to have composed these lines so that they would look long and slender on the page to achieve the outline of the tower's structure. The second stanza represents the "winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair" mentioned in line 17, which would account for the fact that the stanza lacks symmetry among its lines, which appear to extend to various lengths across the page in a way not seen in the other stanzas. Stanzas three and four, identical in form and appearance on the page, represent two ways of looking at the tower windows. Stanza three represents the windows "glittering" from the light of the moon passing through the glass, and stanza four represents the "dusty" inside surface upon which the trapped butterflies cling.Vendler 1972, 81. Themes According to literary critic Northrop Frye, "Blood and the Moon" attempts to portray the achievements of a civilization using allegory, describing the top of the tower that society builds as being an area of death and decay. In the poem, the butterflies that reach the top of the tower are unable to escape through the window and are littered around the room. The second stanza is devoted to describing other methods that poets had used to try to explain the attempt of artists to build their own towers to elevate civilization through poetry only to find, Jonathan Swift in particular, themselves dragged "down into mankind".Frye 1970 p.273 The contrasting elements of the blood described in line 3 and the "purity" of the unclouded moon in line 30 represents a major theme of the work. The moon's surface appears unchanging and contrasts with the earth that has been stained with the blood of men as the result of "arrogant power". As the poem speaks of the pristine nature of the moon's surface in the third stanza Helen Vendler suggests that it broadens the contrast between the two surfaces to highlight the difference between "the mortal and the incorruptible". However, she also states that the poem's theme of life and death shifts focus in the final stanza as the poet discusses the trapped butterflies, which "brings into view the pathos of life, rather than its violence".Vendler 1972, 85-86. Critical response In his book Yeats, critic Harold Bloom describes the poem as being splendid, though theatrical, suggesting that the second stanza is the only part of the poem that fails to achieve its objective, calling it a "pseudo-Swiftian rant".Bloom 1972, 377-378. Vendler also comments on the stanza, suggesting that the fact that it is the only one to have breaks between the lines as well as the incongruity of its form in relation to the others. Bloom, however, uses the problem with the second stanza to show that the poem has flaws that do not exist in other works Yeats wrote in the same period, suggesting that while the poem is "honest", the "strength is not there". See also *Other poems by Yeats References *Bloom, Harold. Yeats. Oxford University Press, 1972 ISBN 978-0195016031. *Bornstein, George. "Yeats and Romanticism". The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Ed Majorie Howes, John Kelly.Cambridge University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-0521650892. *Bushrui, Suheil B. and Tim Prentki. An International Companion to the Poetry of W.B. Yeats Rowman & Littlefield, 1990 ISBN 978-0389209058. *Finneran, Richard J. and George Mills Harper. "Notes". The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900. Scribner, 2000 ISBN 978-0684807270. *Frye, Northrop. "The Top of the Tower: A Study of the Imagery of Yeats".Stubborn Structure. Methuen Young Books 1970 ISBN 978-0416075106 *Jeffares, Norman. W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet. Macmillan, 1996 ISBN 978-0312158149. *Vendler, Helen.Our Secret Decipline: Yeats and the Lyric Form. Harvard University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-0674026957. Notes External links * Nietzsche and Shelley in "Blood and the Moon" by Joseph S. O'Leary Category:1928 poems Category:Irish poems Category:Poetry by W.B. Yeats Category:Text of poem Category:20th-century poems